Blog topic: Born digital

The Lighting the Way project team is pleased to announce the publication of The Lighting the Way Handbook: Case Studies, Guidelines, and Emergent Futures for Archival Discovery and Delivery, edited by M.A. Matienzo and Dinah Handel. It represents the synthesis of the work of participants in the Lighting the Way Working Meeting, a practitioner-focused strategic thinking opportunity intended to explore topics related to archival discovery and delivery. The Lighting the Way Handbook includes case studies on work at specific institutions, chapters exploring the impact of standards and best practices on archival discovery and delivery, and descriptions of emergent opportunities that advocate for new programmatic work, as well as an introduction that contextualizes the chapters, draws thematic connections between them, and provides concrete recommendations about how to advance work on archival discovery and delivery.

Stanford Libraries’ Department of Special Collections is excited to announce that the email archive of Ted Nelson is now available to researchers. Theodor Holm "Ted" Nelson is an information technology pioneer and systems humanist who began his work in these areas in the 1960s. Nelson founded Project Xanadu, a global hypertext system designed to permanently connect different types of documents. He also coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia. The Ted Nelson email archive contains 236,779 messages related to Nelson’s life and work between 2001-2019, covering his more recent work.

How many of us first developed an understanding of the Indian subcontinent and its peoples from the writings of Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie or Rohinton Mistry? Their stories, A Suitable Boy, Midnight's Children and A Fine Balance, introduced the rest of the world to the socio-political tensions fomenting in India since its independence from Britain in 1947.